Paging Marc Andreessen

I stand ready to accept your venture capital funding!

More news about Marc Andreessen making venture investments this morning after the launch of his new $300 million fund, Andreessen Horowitz: he is leading a round of financing for TPM Media, better known as the TalkingPointsMemo blog.

TPM founder Josh Marshall confirmed the pending investment today by phone. The round is small, between $500k and $1 million. Andreessen is leading the round and a number of other angel investors are participating as well.

This comes just a little over a month after Andreessen invested in another blog network, Alley Insider. He clearly likes the format. Both the Alley Insider and Talking Points Memo investments are being done personally by Andreessen, not through the new venture fund.

Huffington Post has received VC support in the past as well. And let me say that new media cannot thrive without outside revenue, or at least very few outlets can. Online ad revenue simply isn't enough.

Talking Points Memo After Dark

Nice headline by Josh Marshall on David Vitter's efforts to take family planning money out of the omnibus spending bill: "Angling For Bareback?"

Quote of the Day material.

...by the way, two thumbs up to the New York Times for taking TPM's lead and reporting the exact same story about banks trying to get grieving mourners to pay their loved one's posthumous debts, without citing them whatsoever. The list of traditional news stories plucked from the blogosphere just got longer.

The Golden Dukes

I'd been somehow ignoring TPM's awards show for the most corrupt Republican officials, but here are the nominees and it's a hoot. Well worth 5 minutes or so of your time. The sheer breadth of Bush Administration and Republican scandals is astounding. And I think there are a lot missing, they actually had to weed some of the garden variety corruption out to end up with this tight list. My favorite so far (somehow I missed this one):

A late, Friday of the deadline nomination for the Outstanding Achievement in Corruption-based Chutzpah section. As outlined by the Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/feedarticle?id=7152378), Ginger Cruz, an deputy at the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) and a wiccan has gone beyond earthly realms in her bid for a Golden Duke. Besides, and I quote, a "sustained patterns of inappropriate behavior", she threatened to "put hexes on employees". Add in a dash of "inappropriate sexual remarks" and "access(ing) without authorization employee e-mail messages stored on computers maintained by the U.S. Army", and you've got a lovely little Bush employee disaster in the works. Outstanding work Ginger!

Oh, did I mention there's an investigation of overspending and mismanagement on top of it?

But there are dozens more just as mind-blowing. Enjoy, you'll thank me later.

Mitt Robby the Robot

Courtesy of Veracifier, TPM has a handy highlight reel of last week's Fox-sponsored Republican primary in New Hampshire.

Included are the greatest hits of the night: opening jokes about a certain Gucci-shod no-show; McCain vs. Romney on Iraq; Giuliani yammering on about New York City; Paul vs. Huckabee on Iraq.

In particular, I would like to draw your attention to a live question filmed off-site and beamed into the debate. Here a man asks Romney a question about Iraq, but then offers a comment to Romney. His question begins at the 8:02 minute marker on the video. Romney's answer begins at about 8:45.



My interest is in the second part of the voter's question: his comment. Note first the context: this man whose son is currently fighting in Iraq wants Romney to know that his words upset him, his wife, and lots of other people. This question would be tricky enough coming from anyone - Romney's comment was, after all, insupportable. But it's even trickier coming from a father whose son risks life and limb every day, while Romney's sons risk only the health effects of eating too many Cool Ranch Doritos.

This particular type of exchange is probably the most important type of question a candidate has to manage.

When someone asks about policy, the question can be roughly stated as: Why should I support you?

But when a voter comments about a candidate's statement that caused him to take umbrage, the question is, Why shouldn't I think you're an asshole?

You can either try to reach someone where he lives to try to talk him out of leaving a bad impression (requiring, at minimum, acknowledging that you understand how this person feels). Or, you can just compound the voter's perception that you're a jerk.

Look carefully at Romney's reaction, helpfully shown here in split-screen alongside the questioner. During the man's policy question, Romney's expression barely changes. Fine; no problems here. Then, as the man heads into his gently emphatic, impassioned comment - accompanied by a rising crescendo of cheers in the audience - Romney begins to smile. One side of his mouth tugs upward, giving him an expression of sardonic forbearance. It is a smirk.

The cheers grow louder and Romney shifts his stance and his mouth twitches as he rearranges his smile. This smile grows through the man's comment and cheers from the audience. Now the space is clear for Romney's response to the questioner. His face executes a series of tiny movements - head nodding in a quick dip and up again; mouth forming words to speak and then re-forming - that telegraph sarcasm. It's as though Romney is winking to the audience while going through the motions of giving his answer.

And Romney's actual answer? He begins with, "Well, there is no comparison," followed by some boiler-plate about our brave young and men in the military. (We know there's no comparison. Romney is the one in need of this lesson - since he's the one who said it in the first place.)

In one exchange, Romney displays all the qualities that make him such a bad candidate:

1) arrogance - he can't even bother to hide his smirk even when his face is in the shot the entire duration of the question;
2) tone-deafness - in missing how egregiously bad his first comment was, then compounding it in his opportunity to fix this error;
3) illogic - in missing the entire point of the question;
4) narcissism: Romney reacts to the cheers of the audience as if he thinks the crowd is on his side rather than that of the off-site voter;
5) lack of empathy: Romney doesn't listen carefully enough to absorb the details (the man and his wife being upset; his son fighting in Iraq; his friends and neighbors, for whom he speaks). Such represent a golden opportunity to incorporate details into his answer in order to demonstrate that he sees this questioner as a man, a neighbor, a fellow American who is a person of significance in his own life and to those who love him.

Romney demonstrates none of the minimum requirements for earning the support and trust of his audience. Indeed, in this one exchange, we see a man consumed by his own arrogance and unable to see the little people whose votes he waits impatiently to buy.

Blogging Gets Mad Respect

A pleasure to wake up to my morning paper and see a great big page-one story on Josh Marshall and the Talking Points Memo empire, specifically acknowledging their role in pushing the Purged Prosecutors story, as well as their role in previous stories (Social Security, Trent Lott's Strom Thurmond comments), and doing a fine job of covering the history of blogging and its place in the future of journalism and politics. McDermott dispatches with the "bloggers are pajama-wearing incivil dirty fucking hippies" myth in the space of two sentences, and shows a real engagement with the medium and the subject. Put it this way, it was better than the WaPo profile of Maryscott O'Connor last year, which sought to put her in the worst possible light to fulfill journalistic biases about blogging. You simply can't do that with Josh; he comes from the world of journalism, first of all, and he has succeeded in doing original reporting in a unique way, relying on the readership to advance a story in many cases.

My only quibble was this line:

Neither side in the blog-MSM debate seems to have great appreciation for what the other brings to the party.

That's wrong. I have a deep appreciation for the tradition of journalism. That's why I do this, because I see journalism, and it's near-fetishistic striving for fake "neutrality," (a topic McDermott addresses, to his credit) and susceptibility to spin, is really crushing its value. The power-holders have found a Trojan Horse into the system of journalism, enabling them to tailor their message to the public by relying on human foibles like vanity and sloth and the tendency to think your friends are being honest with you. Bloggers, at least on the left, are calling for a RETURN to the tradition of journalism, out of respect for the medium and its power to shape the American agenda.

I'm in the midst of a back-and-forth with a blogger on the right currently, and while he's now descended into calling me names and sayiing my arguments are bullshit without saying why, for a moment there he was conceding things and I was conceding things, and there was some actual analysis the likes of which you wouldn't see in a newspaper, simply because the medium doesn't lend itself to it. Print is most certainly not dead, but it does need to think about the way it's been doing business for the past 70 years and make sure it's living up to its responsibilities to challenge the powerful instead of merging with them. Ultimately I think this criticism makes BOTH sides of the journalism/blogger divide better.

Greg Sargent has more.

Blogging isn't just a challenge to journalism, it's a new kind of journalism which -- while it has tons and tons of work to do -- is starting to boast successes that are compelling practitioners of the older form to recognize its legitimacy.

More broadly -- and lest you dismiss this as overly self-hyping, keep in mind that this blog and its author had no significant role in the Attorney Purge coverage -- it's not outlandish to suppose that we'll look back at the Attorney Purge story as another key moment in the history of blogging. Perhaps we'll see it as a moment at which the perceptions of the blogosphere harbored by many professional journalists underwent another fundamental shift -- even a transformative one.